Mississippi River Sunscreen
To save sunscreen when riding your motorcycle to see the Mississippi River, ride west in the morning and east in the afternoon, unless you are traveling at night.
I tried this today going to see the Mississippi River Palisades, near Savanna and it worked just fine. It was a 310-mile round trip from Chicago, at this time of year the way is lined with maybe a million square miles of tall tall corn.
The Palisades is a high bluff overlooking the river due west of Chicago. The state park on top of the bluffs is wooded and shaded, with ample places camp overlooking the Big Muddy. It is a small thing really, and I should not make a big deal of it, but there too few places to eat if you wanted to bring your nitpic basket.
The Mississippi is narrower up here, of course, than it is at the southern tip of Illinois where it merges with the Ohio River, but it is impressive nonetheless.
Twain wrote, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world - four thousand three hundred miles...it is the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges...twenty-five times (the volume of water) as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames." ..."Life on the Mississippi" page 1.
And it helped preserve the Union in the 1860s...even the northern states - even the northernmost slave states - wanted to keep their water highway to the Gulf of Mexico (and the world's markets) open for business without risking Confederate States interference.
I tried this today going to see the Mississippi River Palisades, near Savanna and it worked just fine. It was a 310-mile round trip from Chicago, at this time of year the way is lined with maybe a million square miles of tall tall corn.
The Palisades is a high bluff overlooking the river due west of Chicago. The state park on top of the bluffs is wooded and shaded, with ample places camp overlooking the Big Muddy. It is a small thing really, and I should not make a big deal of it, but there too few places to eat if you wanted to bring your nitpic basket.
The Mississippi is narrower up here, of course, than it is at the southern tip of Illinois where it merges with the Ohio River, but it is impressive nonetheless.
Twain wrote, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world - four thousand three hundred miles...it is the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges...twenty-five times (the volume of water) as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames." ..."Life on the Mississippi" page 1.
And it helped preserve the Union in the 1860s...even the northern states - even the northernmost slave states - wanted to keep their water highway to the Gulf of Mexico (and the world's markets) open for business without risking Confederate States interference.
posted by John Barry at 7/30/2005 06:24:00 PM
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